Sunday links

Indeed, as the current crisis unfolded we saw that the Fed chair was not the most powerful job in the world, that title was reserved for current or former ceos of Goldman Sachs. This must be so because for a while people wanted to fire Bernanke after one term in office primarily because he had inherited a mess whereas when you screw up the global economy as the current or former ceo of Goldman Sachs, people want to help bail you out or make you Treasury Secretary or both.

Enamored of their own technological prowess, Microsoft (ticker: MSFT) and Sony (SNE) offered more expensive video game consoles in the last three years. But the high prices of those machines has rendered game software sales a major victim of the economic downturn, rather than being recession-resistant, as some observers had hoped.

On this trip, I will get a hotel room for less than the upkeep on the room, eat a meal for near what it costs to serve it and — at least according to a sign in the Cheetahs dressing room berating the strippers for undercharging — get some kind of deal in the VIP room. For the first time ever, it is possible to complete a monetary exchange in Las Vegas and feel bad for the other person.

More green shoots have appeared in America in recent weeks, but they are nothing by comparison with the lush jungle sprouting in the East. Asia’s emerging economies probably grew at an average annualised rate of over 10% in the second quarter, while America’s GDP fell by 1%. In 2009 as a whole, recent forecasts suggest that emerging Asia could grow by at least 5%, while the G7 economies contract by 3.5%. The growth gap between the two has never been wider. How have these export-dependent economies managed to decouple from the developed world? And can their recovery last?

The credit crisis was an excellent opportunity to squash the problem of “too big to fail” in the U.S. banking sector. As Meredith Whitney previously noted, it would have been more beneficial to reduce the size of the stronger players in the arena and create thousands of small(er) power players. Instead, we’ve actually increased the risks in the U.S. banking sector by merging together broken banks and giving fewer banks more powers.